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This chapter discusses the aesthetic and political dimensions of the Muslim International through hip-hop culture during a period when the “Black criminal” and the “Muslim terrorist” were viewed as fundamental threats to U.S. national identity. Through the resurgence of Malcolm X and the embrace of Black Islam, hip-hop culture in the 1980s and 1990s tapped into Black internationalism to challenge racial domination, militarism, and mass incarceration, imagining Black freedom beyond the United States and into Africa and the Muslim Third World. The hip-hop culture—like jazz and the Black Arts Movement—became a space where Black radicalism, Islam, and Muslim Third World politics would have a strong influence, interpreted through lyrics that have been expressed by various artists such as Rakim, Public Enemy, Mos Def, Ice Cube, and many others.

This chapter outlines the history and development of the concept of the Muslim International by analyzing various political and cultural histories. It explores the history of Black Islam in the post-World War II era through the figure of Malcolm X and the ways in which the Muslim Third World became both a literal and an ideological backdrop to his unfolding narrative of resistance and internationalism. From Cairo to Harlem, Mecca to Bandung, Algiers to Palestine and beyond, the Muslim Third World played a central role in shaping Malcolm’s political vocabulary and grammar of resistance as he crafted an imaginative geography that connected Black liberation struggles in the United States of America to decolonization in Africa and the Muslim Third World.

This chapter explores the significant connections and interplay between Islam, Black cultural expression and oral traditions, rap, and Hip Hop. Drawing on the literature, the work and words of historical figures and rap and Hip Hop artists and activists, and his own personal and professional narratives, Amer Ahmed highlights the infusion of Islamic ideology and knowledge into Hip Hop. Through the frames of public and hidden discourse, Ahmed illuminates how rap and Hip Hop inform and draw meaning from Black Americans’ resistance to oppression, as well as other global freedom movements. The chapter applies an intersectional lens to multiple levels of inquiry, and to the subjects of identity, intergroup dynamics, and systemic inequality. Ahmed concludes with recommendations for how Hip Hop can be used in critical, liberatory pedagogy and practice.

This chapter explores the political and cultural history of boxer Muhammad Ali and his status as a national hero in the post-Cold War 1990s, a period when the Muslim International, through hip-hop culture, struggled to rekindle and reinvigorate the legacy of Black Islam. This post-Civil Rights fear of the “Muslim terrorist” gave way to a full-blown ideological paradigm of the “Green Menace” of Islam, replacing the “Red Scare” of communism during the Cold War elaborated in Samuel Huntington’s theory of “Clash of Civilizations.” The chapter draws from Huntington’s theory in examining Muhammad Ali’s recuperation being a symbol for the fear and containment of Black Islam within a narrative of American universalism, stripping Black Islam of its internationalist impulses.